Sniper one (36 page)

'Here it comes,' I shouted. Bollocks to maturity.

The closer the F16 came to earth, the louder the jet engines screeched. We craned our necks out of the sangar frantically to catch a glimpse of it, but it was impossible to make anything out in the black of the night sky.

Soon, it sounded like it was coming straight for us. Surely it couldn't get any lower? Just as the furious scream passed right by, a huge white flash engulfed the whole of the horizon for an instant, followed by a giant ball of flame at
Zinc that licked up 50 metres. A fraction of a second later,
BOOM!

Cimic erupted. Cheers and maniacal laughter burst out from all over the compound.

'Yes! Yes! Yes!' shouted Smudge, jumping up and down on the spot.

'Fucking 'ave it,' jeered Rob.

It was a great feeling. For countless days on end, the OMS mortar teams had been blowing us to pieces. They'd badly wounded our cook, they'd nearly killed Oost and me in the sangar, as well as at least a dozen other blokes, and they'd smashed our home to bits. Now they knew what it felt like to get pasted.

The blast must have taken out a few power lines too, because all the lights went out over three square blocks of houses around Zinc. That included the OMS building. Good. Now those fuckers couldn't boil a kettle either.

A few minutes later, the Nimrod, still circling somewhere above us, passed the battle damage assessment down to Buzz. The 500lb bomb had been landed exactly nine metres west of the mortar base plate to limit any damage to the flats to the east. All six members of the mortar crew were vaporized instantly.

A dirty great crater now sat in the park, and the air controller said around forty people were in it pawing over what was left.

'That OK for you, Buzz?'

'Spot on, my man. Pints on me next time I see you, Jimbo.'

'Glad to oblige. Guess what, the F16s wanted to come by and put another one down there on the forty mourners. I had to tell them we couldn't ID them all as hostiles.'

'Don't you just love the Yanks. Shame they didn't.'

'Yes it is. That's us going off task now, Buzz. Cheerio.'

'See you around, old mucker. Out.'

The air strike wasn't going to change a great deal. We all knew the OMS would have another mortar crew in the park by tomorrow night. Even if it was just for a few hours though, we were just a little bit safer. It also meant we could draw up a new column for the Ops Room stats board. It read: 'Air Strike = 1'.

Most importantly, the OMS now had six of their best fertilizing the roses. Fantastic compost.

For the rest of the night, the mortar teams left us alone. The whole town had heard the air strike and knew we had jets up there now. None of them wanted to be the F16s' next prey. But by mid-morning the crews were back to business as usual.

Unfortunately, that morning we also had to say goodbye to Buzz and John. Their time with us had come to an end. Buzz said he was sad to go, and this time we genuinely believed him.

'Baghdad want to know when I'm coming back. They want me up there as soon as possible because of the workload. I've already delayed it twenty-four hours. I asked for another twenty-four, but they'll get proper shitty with me if I don't leave today.'

They were running low on .5 inch ammunition anyway. All the ball and flash tipped rounds had been used up, leaving just the armour-piercing rounds left. You should see the mess that made of people.

They shipped out of Cimic before dawn the next morning, just as discreetly as they had come.

No more Buzz meant no more Beast and no more air strikes. We were on our own again.

That was a shame, because we could have done with Buzz and his entire bag of tricks with the news we got the next morning.

The Intelligence Cell at Abu Naji had passed on an alarming new warning. Working next door to the battle group Ops Room, the Int Cell collated all the snippets of information and gossip they could pick up about the enemy's movements. It was all graded in terms of its reliability; some things were very accurate, other stuff total fantasy. The new warning had the highest reliability grading possible. It came from a tip-off from a senior insurgency source.

Abu Hatim, the brother of the disgraced ex-governor and the self-styled Lord of the Marshes, was back in town. Over the years, he had built up a sizeable and well-armed following at the head of the terrorist resistance against Saddam in Maysan. Amid the chaos of the uprising, he had sensed this was his chance for power. Abu Hatim had struck an alliance with the OMS to join forces and drive us out of Maysan for good. Under the deal, the Lord of the Marshes would then rule it as an extremist Islamic province under Moqtada al-Sadr's supreme authority.

The tip-off also had it that Abu Hatim and the OMS were to launch a major new offensive against us that afternoon. For the first time, all the armed militias in the province would be fighting under a single coordinated military leadership. That spelt big trouble.

The moment the warning came in, all of Sniper Platoon
were dispatched to the roof to keep a lookout for the first sign of any attack. There was nothing for hours.

Then, once the midday heat had died down, a large crowd began to gather outside the Pink Palace. They carried placards and chanted slogans about Moqtada and Najaf. A man in his fifties bleated fury into a loudspeaker, whipping up the mob's passions further. None of them was armed, so they could stand there all day for all we cared.

Then we spotted something of more concern. Using the crowds to distract some of our attention, half a dozen gunmen were creeping up on us through the shadows of Tigris Street.

I went straight for my PRR speak button.

'Stand-to! Stand-to!'

First it was just that handful; then we spotted another small group approaching elsewhere from the west, and then another in the east too. Others had slipped among the rubble of the north bank. Soon, we'd identified at least twelve different concealed enemy positions. Without firing a shot, the fighters had fanned out in a large circle around us. There were easily over 100 of them in total.

Shit. The intelligence was obviously spot on. Three minutes later, every Cimic defender was in his battle position. Another message over the PRR from a sentry.

'Ops Room, Front Sangar. RPG men ducking in and out of the alleys in front of us. Must be a dozen of them in there.'

That prompted a suggestion from Des. His South African blood was properly up now.

'Want me to get out there with my blade, Danny? I don't mind knifing a few of them.'

Before I could reply, an RPG warhead soared up at us from the north bank and shot straight over all our heads.
It was the signal for the lot of them to open fire.

Immediately, we were giving it back at them just as good. Half a dozen Gimpys roared out from all round the compound, interspersed by the constant chatter of Minimi bursts and the single aimed shots of two dozen SA80s.

We were putting down a good weight of lead, and managed to slot the odd one or two; but on the whole, the gunmen were all being very careful to stay back at least 500 metres from us. That way, neither side was really close enough to do each other any real damage.

After the attack's initial fifteen minutes, the 360-degree fire tailed off to be replaced by shorter exchanges between individual positions. That went on for another half an hour or so. Then the enemy ceased firing altogether, and we followed suit. In small groups again, they began to withdraw.

Chris was livid.

'What the fuck are they doing? Come on, you fucks! We're fucking ready for you, don't run away.'

It hadn't been much of an all-out attack. The biggest force we'd seen so far had clearly massed for what had threatened to be a proper assault. Bizarrely, it had finished before it had even really begun. The question was why? For once, the enemy had amassed a seriously potent and coordinated force, but they didn't seem to have any intention of using it. Could they really have lost their bottle that easily?

Pikey thought he had the answer.

'Hah! It's obvious. This Abu Shat-im-self is obviously a fucking pussy.'

It wasn't the Abu Hatim we'd heard all about, and it certainly wasn't the OMS we knew either. By the time the engagement had been over for an hour though, nobody bothered to give it any more thought. As far as we were
concerned, they were all fucking mad anyway. There was never any point in trying to get inside a Maysani's psyche. You'd soon end up in a loony bin yourself.

As we gloated over our mini-victory, back in Basra there were graver moves afoot. There was no mood of celebration in Brigade HQ. The senior brass had heard enough. The situation in Najaf was still no better, and southern Iraq remained on the brink. No matter how ineffective their assault on us had been, the brigade staff didn't like the sound of the new intelligence about Abu Hatim and the OMS one little bit.

On top of that, we'd also lost another soldier in action. A lance jack serving with the Cheshire Regiment had been shot dead during a gun battle with the Mehdi Army in Basra. The brigade's fourth death since the start of the month.

Enough was enough. It took us all by surprise, but the reality was it had been in the pipeline for ages. An order came through for us to prepare to withdraw from Cimic House. We had to be ready to move by 1600 the next day.

Strategically, it was a difficult call. It was hard to deny that the cost of holding Cimic was beginning to outweigh its purpose. The place had been smashed up so badly that there was nothing really left to defend. Being there for the sake of it made less and less sense, and a massacre was indeed far from out of the question.

On the other side, a withdrawal might save a bit of blood in the short term, but we'd have to come back into Al Amarah sooner or later. We were never going to abandon the city for good. Everyone who'd actually been to Al Amarah knew that fighting our way back in would prove a full-on nightmare.

Personally, the idea of a withdrawal really pissed me off.
Letting the OMS win really stuck in my gut. Orders are orders though, so I just got on with it and told the boys to start packing.

'Remember, lads, we're all leaving on foot. Whatever you can't carry gets left behind.'

For the rest of the day, Cimic resembled a madhouse. It was like a scene out of a World War Two movie.

Everything of any military value that we couldn't carry had to be destroyed. That meant huge piles of papers had to be burnt. A pit was dug in the garden for a bonfire, and on it went company admin documents, spare maps, and endless bundles of CPA and CIMIC paperwork.

Blokes were dumping all sorts of kit in great piles around the house. A ton of stuff had been accumulated over the tour. Now that nobody had the luxury of freighting it home, it all had to go. TVs, fridges, PlayStations, souvenirs, toiletries, Arab rugs, extra webbing, duvets – even Ads's mammoth porn stash; it all got binned.

The place was also rigged for detonation. Nothing was to be left in the hands of the enemy. Assault engineers put strips of plastic explosives inside the boats, over their outboard engines and in the few remaining vehicles that still worked. The rooms in Cimic where we would have to dump heavy equipment such as big radios also got wired up, along with the equipment for good measure. It was all ready to go, and just needed a few live detonators to be slipped in at the last minute. The second we left it, the camp would be blown to smithereens.

As they dismantled everything on the roof, the boys aired their feelings about the withdrawal. I was proud to find them just as angry as I was. They were being offered a ticket out of that pit of squalor and degradation. But none of them wanted it.

A Chinese parliament gathered. Pikey took his usual considered approach.

'Fucking twats, cunts, wankers and bastards. We get battered to fuck, mortared to death, shot to buggery, and all those hoops in brigade have to say is, pull out?'

'Bollocks to them,' said Daz in agreement.

'Never mind all that,' chimed in Oost. 'We're going to be bored stiff in Abu Napa. All I'll get is the RSM going on about getting my hair cut again.'

Des backed his countryman up.

'Too fucking right, man. Where's the fun to be had back there, hey?'

But Chris had the best point of all.

'What about Ray? If we pull out now, what did he die for then?'

The whole platoon yessed in agreement to that.

Being the gentle giant that he was (when John Wedlock wasn't about), Louey almost always kept his opinions to himself. At that moment though even he felt motivated to speak up, and directly to me.

'Full respect, Sergeant, but I think it is wrong to leave. You know, man, Cimic is our home.'

Right. I had to tell Captain Curry about the strength of the boys' feeling in the O Group. I felt it was important he knew. All the multiple 2i/cs and the CIMIC boss were brought in especially for it that night too. It was an important occasion. As it happened, Captain Curry asked for our thoughts first before I even got a chance.

'Right, chaps. The CO has been on. He's very uncomfortable at having to send the battle group back into the city if we pull out of it. Some are saying we could do it when Najaf is all over. But you and I and he all know the OMS won't let that happen peacefully in a million years.

'He's spoken to the brigadier and persuaded him that the final decision should rest with the men on the ground. Only we know what we're capable of. So whether we leave or not tomorrow is now up to me. That's why I've got you all in. I want to know what you think.'

We discussed the merits of both arguments for almost an hour. To my delight, other platoon commanders reported back the same thing. Nobody wanted to leave.

One of the junior officers made the best speech.

'Look, sir, we've had a fair few nasty injuries and even more close shaves, admittedly. But we haven't actually had a single fatality to hostile fire yet. We're fighting brilliantly and we've still got a bit of ammo left.'

'That's true, sir,' confirmed Dale.

The officer concluded. 'The point is, sir, we don't need to pull out
yet
. I say let's see if we can finish the job.'